I saw a story linked on Instapundit, but it really belonged on The Onion.
Apparently, our tax dollars are being used to fund grief counseling for congressional staffers who will lose their jobs in January because of the elections. Can you think of a better example than this of how Washington is screwed up?
This isn’t just a symbol of fiscal excess (though it definitely belongs in that category). It’s also a sign of the wuss-ification (not a technical term, but you know what I mean) of American society. Are we really so pathetically fragile that we need professional hand-holders for something like this? It’s not like people who work on Capitol Hill don’t know ahead of time about elections.
Besides, there’s a what-goes-around-comes-around element to this story. I’m not trying to be callous. Unemployment can be a terrible thing, particularly for people who have kids. But these congressional staffers spent their days figuring out ways to impose costs on the rest of us. They schemed to reduce our freedoms and take our money. These are people who pushed policies that resulted in job losses for millions of people in the productive sector of the economy.
Asking me to feel sorry for these people is like asking me to have pity on burglars who dislike door locks, alarm systems, and armed homeowners.
Here’s an excerpt from the Politico story.
A staffer for a congressional Democrat who came up short on Tuesday reports that a team of about five people stopped by their offices this morning to talk about payroll, benefits, writing a résumé, and so forth, with staffers who are now job hunting. But one of the staffers was described as a “counselor” to help with the emotional aspect of the loss — and a section in the packet each staffer was given dealt with the stages of grief (for instance, Stage One being anger, and so on). “It was like it was about death,” the staffer said. “It was bizarre.”
[…] fingers crossed that politicians don’t deal with this issue by re-hiring the taxpayer-financed “grief counselors” who were used to console Democratic staffers after the 2010 […]
[…] crossed that politicians don’t deal with this issue by re-hiring the taxpayer-financed “grief counselors” who were used to console Democratic staffers after the 2010 […]
[…] But you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs. And if things get too hard for those blokes and gals, maybe the powers that be on the Hill can re-hire the grief counselors who were put on the payroll after the 2010 elections. […]
[…] This isn’t just a symbol of fiscal excess (though it definitely belongs in that category). It’s also a sign of the wuss-ification (not a technical term, but you know what I mean) of American society. Are we really so pathetically fragile that we need professional hand-holders for something like this? It’s not like people who work on Capitol Hill don’t know ahead of time about elections. (From Dan Mitchell @ International Liberty). Congressional Staffers Should Cry on Their Own Dime. […]
I suspect that this is not so much a good example of “wuss-ification”, but more to the point a great example of … uh …
… what would you call it if I was manager of your company and employed my brother-in-law as a water-cooler attendant? There must be a word for that.
… besides, “thief”, I mean.
The “wuss-ification” aspect is merely an example of how pathetic the justifications have become for spending someone else’s money in this limp-wristed, politically correct Hell.
It reminds me of that Richard Pryor movie, “Brewster’s Millions”, where he has to intentionally waste $30 million, with the condition that he get, “value for money”. (ie. he can’t just pay someone $10 million for a haircut or something). So he comes up will all manner of tenuous justifications for spending money.
Still, they weren’t half as lame as this.